A short description of how and why you got started in social media
Studying Psychology at University sparked an interest in consumer behavior so I developed that by perusing further studies into Digital Marketing. I could see how Social Media and digital marketing was evolving and that demand for these jobs was increasing, so I felt it would be a good move into an area that could be used in any industry. I have also had another career in the music industry but that’s another story!
What do you believe the benefits are of using social media for business?
Social Media enables a business to engage with its customers and enhance its brand reputation. It also enables organisations to measure the social impact of their brand or product by listening to what people saying about you. Once of the most insightful things about Social Media is the ability to identify who is having the biggest influence around a certain topic. By identifying influencers you can engage with them and they can help you spread your message through the ripple effect.
What do you think are common mistakes business owners make when building brand awareness on social media?
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is too much focus on follower counts, just because someone has 5 million followers that doesn’t mean they are necessarily influential, engagement around a topic is a better measure.
Another mistake is not having a content marketing strategy, if a brand posts content that doesn’t follow a trend relevant to their industry then the type of people that will engage with you won’t be relevant either.
Lastly one thing that should be avoided is copying and pasting the same message across all your channels. Try and treat each audience like a separate entity and write unique messages for each of them.
What qualities do you think social media managers should have?
The ability to respond quickly to all messages, people are much more likely to appreciate you if you get back to them quickly. The ability to be succinct, there’s no room for waffle on social media, people can see straight through it, be direct and get to the point.
A social media manager must be able to have their finger on the pulse and know when a hot topic comes along that is worth spreading. Similarly they should be able to know how to use new tools and automation software as it becomes available.
How do Business owners know if their social media campaign is working?
Measure the response, look at your KPIs. For example if you’re tweeting links to your site how many clicks did you get that month compared to last month? Unique visitors is a good metric, have a scorecard and keep it updated to see what’s changed and why. Impressions is another one, use twitter analytics to see which tweets did well and repeat more of those. If you’re publishing white papers, how many people downloaded it this month compared to last? Use these metrics to evaluate the campaign and make tweaks where necessary.
How do you see social media evolving over the next 5 years …what do you hope to see?
Influencer marketing is growing and growing, I can imagine this impacting more and more on traditional advertising, as organisations see they are getting better results from influencers and spending less money than they would have on advertising.
I can also imagine cross channel analysis becoming more evolved, with new software that can combine the metrics from all channels to produce an overall picture of how you are doing on Social Media, at the moment all that is restricting this is the API feeds that we are given. Sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Vine are only allowing hashtag or user searches at the moment. Eventually they will have to meet the demand for full boolean searches of the comments. Facebook has just started letting you search for Topic data now via data sift, although this is anonymous and very general demographic data so not as useful as the twitter data we can get from gnip.
If you could share one best practice about using social media to grow a business, what would it be?
Identify your company’s key influencers, map the community to give you a better understanding, listen to what they say to tailor your engagement. Engage with excellent content, measure your ROI and performance and finally scale your programme to influence more.
What are your favourite platforms for social media marketing? What tools do you use to manage these platforms? – What are the limitations for these tools?
As I work for Onalytica I’m fortunate to have full access to their IRM software, I use it daily as it enables me to create influencer programmes populated with the most valuable users. I can then easily analyse their topics of conversation on Twitter and in their blogs and engage with them. Other daily tools I use are Union Metrics which covers influencers on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. I use Hootsuite for monitoring and Buffer for scheduling posts. Tag sleuth is good for quick searches on Vine and YouTube. Another free tool I use which has just been released is Onalytica’s content seeding tool, which allows you identify influencers by uploading your own piece of content, or something relevant to you. This tool then scans the nouns in the pdf or word doc and correlates that to people’s tweets and bios. http://content.onalytica.com/
The limitations of these tools are mainly restricted by the API feeds social media sites will release.
Describe one of your social media campaigns that went really well.
We just ran a campaign identifying the Top 100 most influential brands and individuals in PR which broke our record for the number of unique visitors on our site in one day. It also received 1719 shares in 12 hrs, and received 22,840 Twitter impressions.
How is your social media strategy adapted to your industry?
Working for an Influencer Marketing company we can relate to any industry, so we adapt our social media strategy to the biggest topics that are trending, such as Big Data, Digital Health, IOT, PR, Content Marketing, etc. and then we identify who the key influencers are in these areas and publish top 100 lists. This drives traffic to our website where people can learn more about our software.
